1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to salience based compression and video transmission and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for vision and network guided pre-filtering of video content.
2. Description of the Related Art
When video and image data is captured by a video sensor such as a video camera, the device often saves the video and image data in a compressed format to internal or external storage, or an external video database. Oftentimes, this video content is accessed across a network by various users or end-user devices. Before the content can be shared, however, the video must be encoded by a video encoder to compress the video further in order for the network bandwidth to support the transmission of the video. The video encoder modifies the bit-rate of the content according to the available bandwidth of the network and a video decoder decodes the video for displaying on a conventional display or for storage in another database. Technologies such as vision guided compression (VGC) or salience based compression (SBC) are often used to perform compression on video content to reduce bit rate so as to reduce network bandwidth requirements by preserving important and actionable details in the original video content in salient regions at the cost of discarding “unimportant” detail in non-salient regions. However, standard VGC/SBC methods do not address a network's variable bandwidth or delivering actionable video on very low bandwidth networks and therefore video streaming may be interrupted or distorted.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for vision and network guided pre-filtering to perform video encoding for low and variable bandwidth networks.